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Changing footage from squeeze to 16:9 in FCP
I plan on having two versions of my short film. One for widescreen tv’s and one of course for 4:3, both displaying a 16:9 picture. I found it more pleasing to edit my footage in anamophic mode, but now near the end I realized that it might of been easier to edit in non-anamorphic, export a version for 16:9 tvs, then bring back in the quicktime movie and change the whole clip (movie) to anamorphic, so it will display 16:9 on 4:3 tvs. Or is there an easy way to change a bunch of clips in the timeline back to non-anamophic mode? I am confusesd, and need help…I hope this makes sense! PS I shot all my footage on a DVX100A in squeeze mode. 24PA.
Thanks
Jeremy -
3 Replies
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Hi Jeremy,
I think you’re already on the right track. You’ve captured your original footage properly as anamorphic because you shot in the DVX100A’s squeeze mode. You’re also editing in an anamorphic timeline, which is also the right way to do it. When you export your final movie, just use the same preset as your sequence. If you changed any of your clips to non-anamorphic then everything would get tall and skinny and your exported QT movie would be the same as well because you didn’t shoot it that way. In order to make a full screen movie of your anamorphic footage you’d have to crop the sides of your picture to 4:3 and then expand it to fill the voids on all four sides, thereby losing resolution and ultimately resulting in a poorer quality final movie.
If you’re going to DVD then bring the movie into whatever program you’re using (let’s pretend it’s DVDSP) and make sure your video track is set to 16:9 letterbox. Your finished DVD will play in 16:9 mode on both widescreen and full screen televisions in the proper aspect ratio. Of course, on the full screen TV the black letterbox bands on the top and bottom of the screen will be much larger, but it will still play with the same 16:9 aspect ratio.
This is the way I’ve always done it and there’s never been a problem playing the DVD on either type of TV.
Hope this helps.
– Don
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Don Thanks for your reply. I’ve noticed that if I play my footage back from my camera to a 16:9 tv, the t.v. compresses the squeezed footage to look normal, it fills the 16:9 screen without the letterbox, which is what I want. But if I play the footage from my camera to a 4:3 tv the footage is of course stretched. So I am led to believe that a version for 16:9 tvs should be exported from FCP in non-anamorphic mode, so the footage will fill the widescreen tv, without the letterbox, but in 16:9. Then I could bring the exported movie back in to FCP and apply the anamophic setting to the whole clip, which I would then export an anamophic, 16:9, letterbox version for 4:3 tvs. But since I already edited most of the movie in anamorhpic, is there an easy way to change all the clips in my timeline to non-anamorphic?
Thanks again Jeremy
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You can create a new non-anamorphic sequence, go to your anamorphic sequence, hit select all (Command-A) then copy (Command-C) and then paste everything into the new 4:3 sequence (Command-V). That should do it, quick and easy.
I have a 26in. LCD widescreen television in my studio. When I view a 16:9 DVD I’ve created I’m presented with many viewing choices, one of which is to view the widescreen movie without letterboxing. This aspect ratio is actually 15:9, and the drawback to that is you lose some of the frame on both sides of the screen. This sounds like what you want to do. As long as you’e aware of the trade off of not wanting to see the letterboxing……
– Don
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